


Kitty Pryde, the Excalibur Years: A Story in Nine and a Half Unpacked Boxes

by Deifire



Category: Excalibur (Comic)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 06:02:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2802173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deifire/pseuds/Deifire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kitty Pryde was many things and extremely competent at all of them. </p><p>So what if she was absolutely terrible at unpacking?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kitty Pryde, the Excalibur Years: A Story in Nine and a Half Unpacked Boxes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Port](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Port/gifts).



Kitty Pryde was many things—mutant, superhero, ninja, computer goddess—and, if not exactly the very best at every single one of them, extremely competent at what she did. This did not, however, mean she was good at everything. 

But so what if she was absolutely terrible at unpacking?

She never meant to be, of course. Every time the team changed addresses, she made a vow that _this_ would be the time she would finally get everything unboxed and sorted, get organized, and get rid of the things she didn’t need. Every time, she’d only find herself sighing again as she added the still-unopened boxes to the growing pile of stuff she’d managed to accumulate in the meantime, swearing that next time, at the next place, things would be different.

They never were.

In fact, if she’d been keeping track, she might have realized that there were nine and a half boxes full of things from her life before Excalibur that she’d never managed to unpack the entire time she was in Britain.

Granted, the first two weren’t exactly her fault. They were the boxes of software she and Doug Ramsey had created together that hadn’t survived the move into the lighthouse thanks to Brian Braddock dropping a giant, heavy crate on them.

Brian had felt so guilty about that. Guilt that hadn’t been helped by the terrible mood Kitty had been in that day, which she had somewhat unfairly taken out on him. He’d insisted on buying her replacements, despite her weak protests. She’d given up early on, because she was pretty sure continuing to insist that she didn’t need her software to be replaced would just lead to having to admit that part of the terrible mood had been due to the realization that none of it _could_ be replaced, because Doug couldn’t be replaced. Saying that aloud would have just made Brian feel worse.

So she’d let him take her on a shopping trip to the computer store on the mainland, and after that, out for lunch, where Brian revealed that he himself had dabbled in a bit of programming back in graduate school.

At which point, Kitty did not exactly succeed in failing to look startled. As much as she hated to admit it to herself, she’d forgotten he had been to graduate school. Her default mental image of Brian Braddock was of a guy who punched things in the name of justice and sometimes drank slightly too much in his time off, not of the brilliant physicist he had been before taking on the mantle of Captain Britain. Brian had asked about her research, and she’d asked about his, and they spent a happy couple of hours with no teammates to bore, talking shop, drinking tea, and letting their food get cold.

Kitty and Brian were never the closest of teammates, and they didn’t become so after that day, but she always remembered it with a smile, especially during the increasingly infrequent occasions in the years after Excalibur when one of them would contact the other, needing to brainstorm with somebody far removed from day-to-day life and the current crisis of the moment.

~

Boxes three, four, and five, based on their size and weight, were probably mostly computer books and old programming notes. They sat piled in a corner until the day they were destroyed when the what later came to be known as the Interdimensional Incident—specifically, the one involving yet another duplicate of the Omniversal Majestrix Saturnyne, an alien raccoon, a doomsday device disguised as a small bowl of custard, and an epic swordfight between Nightcrawler, Nightcrawler’s Nazi doppelganger from Earth-597, a swashbuckling alternate reality version of the Asgardian villain Loki, and a guy who looked remarkably like Mandy Patinkin might have looked if he possessed both Wolverine’s adamantium claws and Magik’s eldritch armor—had spilled over into Kitty’s room.

It was the sort of thing that happened when you lived in a place with a dimensional nexus in the basement.

She would have gotten upset over the loss of the notes, but figured it had been months since she’d even needed to look at them. Besides it had been worth the tradeoff to get to join the fuzzy elf in action during one of his finer hours and to ever after have a story to tell at parties that contained the phrase, “…and then I phased and short-circuited the bowl of custard seconds before the Earth would have been annihilated…”

~

The sixth box was small, marked “THINGS FROM SCHOOL” in black Sharpie, and had lasted until the ill-fated day Kitty decided she was going to finally finish unpacking and Meggan offered to help. Things had been going well, actually, until Meggan touched the outside of that particular box and her eyes started glowing red. And she turned a particularly nasty shade of green. And suddenly started sprouting tentacles. And began screaming something unpleasant-sounding in a language Kitty didn’t understand.

It had seemed to go for a small eternity, but in reality only lasted the few agonizing minutes it took Rachel to fly the box into space and disintegrate it without opening it.

Kitty never could remember what was in that box. She eventually decided maybe some of her stuff had gotten mixed up with some of Illyana’s and tried not to think about it too often.

~

The seventh box was one Kitty would pick up from time to time, before realizing it was probably full of clothes she’d outgrown, in style at least, even if they technically still fit. By that time, Kitty was sure she owned more outfits than she normally had opportunities to venture outside the lighthouse in civilian attire during the course of a year. So opening the box and sorting through it would have meant the beginning of the wardrobe-pruning project culminating in a huge donation to charity Kitty always told herself she meant to get around to someday, but could never quite bring herself to start. Instead, she’d sigh and put it back up on a shelf somewhere.

So, she wasn’t terribly upset when that box was among the things destroyed in Phoenix’s battle with Necrom. 

She definitely hadn’t expected Rachel to remember it many, many months later, after a stint in deep space followed by a trip to an apocalyptic future, and to insist on buying Kitty replacement clothes. She’d started to refuse, then seen the look in her teammate’s eyes that meant something was wrong that Rachel didn’t want to talk about and that _Rachel_ desperately needed some retail therapy, and couldn’t bring herself to say no.

She also couldn’t bring herself to say no when Rachel, being Rachel, had talked her into adding three dresses with low necklines, high hemlines, and quite a bit of slink to them to her pile of otherwise not-quite-Phoenix-approved purchases. 

Those weren’t items Kitty could bring herself to wear in public without feeling horribly embarrassed, but they were some of her last gifts from Rachel before the latter disappeared into the timestream, so she’d kept them until the day Pete Wisdom found them, tags still on, hanging in the back of a whole other wardrobe that was once again in need of some serious pruning. He’d raised an eyebrow suggestively, and there had been just the slightest bit of an argument, before she finally agreed to try one on. It still fit. If anything, it had gained just the slightest bit more slink…which, Kitty was forced to admit, only made it look better.

Oddly enough, when she wore it in public on their date that night, she didn’t feel embarrassed at all.

She couldn’t say the same for her experience with the second dress on their next date, but that was only because it hadn’t been designed to be worn during a running firefight following a sneak attack by Black Air agents who weren’t polite enough to let a woman finish her expensive dessert before moving in for the kill. But that was a whole other story…

~

The eighth box got lost, the way boxes sometimes do, somewhere during the move between Braddock Manor and Muir Island. As the list of Kitty’s recent losses at the time had been headed by her vey best friend in the whole world, Illyana, and had included, at least temporarily, no less than six of her teammates, she never even noticed.

~

The ninth box was labeled “Memories--Kitty” and turned out to contain photographs. Mostly of Kitty and various people at Xavier’s, though she was sure if she dug far enough, she would find the albums her mother had put together, including photos of the family back when her parents were still occasionally talking instead of fighting, and some semi-embarrassing solo shots of a young Kitty Pryde, probably excited about events like starting her first day of kindergarten. (That particular excitement hadn’t even lasted as long as her parent’s marriage, she remembered. She had come home angry about the fact that most of kindergarten seemed to consist of sitting quietly in a circle and nobody would even let her read or do any math yet.)

Kitty hadn’t yet been particularly intent on reliving memories she hadn’t seen in years, so that box had stayed packed until shortly after the team met the techno-organic entity calling itself Douglock, when suddenly opening it seemed like a really good idea. She’d gotten about halfway through it before she found some group shots featuring a smiling Doug Ramsey and herself, along with assorted New Mutants, and decided to show them to Douglock in hopes that it would reactivate the memories of the days when he’d been her friend. 

That plan…hadn’t worked at all well.

She’d left the box half-packed, always meaning to get back to it at some point when she wasn’t using all of her inner strength and mental energy dealing with some crisis or another in the present. And then one day Lockheed, dealing with both a head cold and a recent traumatic experience involving an army of living Bamf dolls, crawled inside it to get some sleep.

And sneezed.

The poor thing had to spend the rest of his recovery period in one of the more fireproof areas of Moira’s lab, as it turned out very stressed, sick dragons aren’t quite as good at not accidentally incinerating things as one might hope.

~

Kitty rediscovered the last box on a shelf in her room the day after Brian and Meggan’s wedding. The day she began packing to head back to New York. It was medium-sized, neither exceptionally light nor exceptionally heavy, and marked “Kitty’s Stuff” in her faded teenage handwriting.

She started to add it to the pile of boxes she’d just packed, and hesitated. She started to open it, then hesitated again. Whatever was inside, it was stuff she hadn’t seen since she was last one of the X-Men.

“What do you think, Lockheed?” she asked the dragon on her shoulder. “Do I keep it? Open it? Toss it into the ocean sight unseen?”

Lockheed made a non-committal noise, then curled up and closed his eyes.

“You’re no help, dragon,” she muttered. “If I haven’t opened it in this long, it’s not as though I really need it. Of course, it’s not as though I really need any of this. Face it, if my unpacking track record continues the way it has, years from now I’m going to run across a bunch of this other stuff, still in boxes, and remember how I haven’t seen it since there used to be an Excalibur. I’ll think about how we thought it was a good idea to live in a lighthouse seventeen miles from anywhere with one bathroom for five teammates, and how you and Widget used to chase each other all over my room any time I was trying to get work done, and that time Kurt and Rachel…”

She was interrupted by a _bamf_ and the telltale smell of sulfur.

“Hi Kurt,” she said.

“Packing, _Kätzchen_?” asked the man who had just teleported into her room.

“Yeah, just deciding what to do about some...memories, I suppose,” she said.

“ _Ja_ ,” said Kurt. “I understand. I, too, have many memories that are coming with me. And, surprisingly, many novelty coffee mugs. I have no idea how I managed to accumulate such a collection. At any rate, Piotr wanted me to let you know that the jet is here and that he is starting to load things onto it. If you have anything ready to go and would like, I can start taking things to him.”

She hesitated a bit before handing him the “Kitty’s Stuff” box. “This,” she said. “Also, that pile of stuff in the corner. The electronics are all marked fragile. Let me finish packing up the rest of my clothes and shoes, and then I’ll come help load, okay?”

He nodded, took the box, and teleported away.

She shrugged, slightly dislodging Lockheed who made a complaining noise. “It’s not as though there won’t be room where we’re going,” she told her dragon. “It’s a mansion after all.”

She turned back to packing, making a vow that when they landed in the States, she would unpack immediately. Every box, without hesitation. _This_ would be the time she would finally get organized and make sure she kept only what she needed.


End file.
